Exploring quantum physics plus consciousness, meditation, the afterlife and ancient mystical teachings from the perspective of modern science.

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Stuff that moves has energy by virtue of the fact that it’s moving. Although it’s hard to say what energy really is, we know it when we see it, and movement definitely counts. In this tutorial we’ll do a little bit of algebra to get from our basic definition of energy to figuring out how much energy a moving thing has, exactly. This is really going to help a lot when we get on to looking at light and photons. Honest.

Before we start looking at light, let’s break down some of the key concepts involved in understanding light. We’ll start here with energy; a term that is rigorously defined in physics and yet nevertheless impossible to fully grasp. In fact, it’s surprising how many things in physics, or indeed in life, are possible to define and yet impossible to grasp. At least being able to define a thing is better than bandying about words without having any clear agreed definition — we’ll leave that to philosophers. At least for now.

Photos are weird. Fact. Once we start thinking that light is made up of photons, we’re left with some pretty strange conundrums just as soon as we start to think it through. It’s almost enough to make you give up and start arguing that photons don’t exist …. except that they’re so darned useful. By considering the weird nature of polarized photons, we can start to see what kind of mathematical theorem we might be looking for exactly, when we’re trying to formulate a mechanics of the quantum realm.

A tutorial on polarized light. Polarized light behaves according to rules that we could think of as belong to classical physics. Nothing too weird happens, and we can make concrete predictions about future observations on the same ray of light. But don’t worry, things are going to get very crazy when we start to look at photos in the next tutorial. This tutorial just paves the way for the vile monstrous insanity that is to follow.